Descartes thinks about the soul

 One of the strangest bits of thinking I know of is Descartes’s argument for the existence of a soul.

You can imagine not having a body. The very fact that you can imagine that means there’s a logical possibility that a body-less soul exists. (Unicorns don’t exist. But, since you can imagine them, there’s a logical possibility they exist. Perhaps they exist in a distant galaxy. We’d have to go there to confirm or reject the possibility.)

So far, so good. Here’s the strange turn in Descartes’s thought: He held that the fact that you could imagine one without the other — a soul without a body — meant that we have to be talking about two distinct things.

The argument rejects the position that the soul is just a convenient way of talking about characteristics of particular organisms or bodies. We say that John is an honest soul, and Sally is a scientifically-inclined soul, while her brother Sam is an artistic soul. We build the same convenient constructions with words like “minds” and “persons.” But when we’re talking about John’s honest soul, what some of us are really talking about is the organism known as John and some of his traits or characteristics.

That’s what many of us mean when we’re talking about a “soul” or a “mind.”

Descartes argues otherwise. The idea that we can derive “soul” from “body” is simply wrong. His argument contends that the logical distinction implies an ontological distinction — there must be two separate things. Two kinds of stuff.

I think the argument ingenious and fascinating. Philosophy teachers, when they are trying to show students the problem with Descartes’s argument, often tell the story of the Morning Star and the Evening Star.

For eons, human beings looked at the brightest object in the morning sky and called it the Morning Star. And they looked at the brightest object in the evening sky and called it the Evening Star. The two are logically distinct.

But, with advances in astronomy, we learned that both bright objects are not stars, but a single planet: Venus.

The Morning Star and Evening Star are logically distinct ideas, but they are same thing. Similarly, soul (or mind) and body might be logically distinct, but the same thing. Or so it seems to me.

But I have grown used to being wrong— or, rather, changing my mind — about such things. What hasn’t changed is the fascination with Descartes. I was a teenager when I first read this argument. It’s still one of the most interesting specimens in the literature of logic.

• Source: René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy. The argument is in the Sixth Meditation.

A story about the cellphone

  I traded cellphones and suddenly found myself with a lot more time on my hands.

The new phone is allegedly light years ahead of the old clunker, but my sudden liberation had nothing to do with technological efficiency.

The new phone doesn’t work. It doesn’t cooperate with my hearing aids. It won’t let me read my newspapers.

The first day was bad. The second day I sensed possibilities.

Don’t get me wrong. The phone is useful technology. It has many tools, which I’m unwilling to give up. But it had also become a tool for fidgeting — and that I can do without.

Montaigne said that when the ancient Cretans wanted to curse a man, they prayed that he would catch a bad habit.

The late arrival of negative numbers

 Here is a remarkable line from Pascal’s Pensées: “I know people who cannot understand that when you subtract four from zero what is left is zero.”

Do you hear the tone? It’s the exasperated sound of a man who’s frustrated that he has friends who can’t grasp the simplest ideas in mathematics.

What we notice: This learned man had no concept of negative numbers. I’m pretty sure I learned about them from Miss Fisher in third grade.

Leidy Klotz pointed out Pascal’s difficulty in his book Subtract (Aug. 27, 2022).

We tend to think — well, at least I do — that our conceptual foundations develop incrementally, in roughly the order we learn them in school. (We’re ready for negative numbers in third grade but have to wait on geometry until later.)

Pascal’s line is evidence that’s just not so.

Pascal did some interesting work on probability theory. Soon after Pascal died, Leibnitz and Newton developed calculus in the late 1600s. Meanwhile, the leading lights of Western Civilization would stumble along without negative numbers, which didn’t come into common usage until the 19^th century.

• Source: Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less; New York: Flatiron Books, 2021.

Dylan Thomas's spellbinding voice

 When I was a boy, my father brought home an album from the library. The recordings were of Dylan Thomas reading poems.

Abilene, Texas was not exactly a cosmopolitan place in the early 1960s. Thomas was a spellbinding reader. His voice was an instrument I’d not heard before.

I was too little to understand anything he said. But I came away with a conviction that I would like to know poets.

Decades later, I found, in a public library, a book by Ralph Maud and Aneiran Talfin Davies on Thomas’s readings.

Thomas made radio broadcasts featuring his favorite poets. He called them “anthologies,” with comments. He loved the Welsh poets, and so he would read Wilfred Owen, Sir Philip Sidney and Edward Thomas.

His collection of performance material was made by simply copying poems he liked by hand. He’d get a poem in memory by copying it.

He had about 80 in his collection. They were his standards on his reading tours. He could do a broadcast on the spot.

He liked D.H. Lawrence’s “The Ship of Death” with its description of the ship that will take the soul to Valhalla and Housman’s “Infant Innocence” (The grizzly bear is huge and wild … ) 

A concert, if that’s the right word, covered favorite themes: death, doubt, drink.

I like a lot of poets. Today, Thomas would be far down on a list of my favorites. But in a way he got me started.

The real influence here was that of my father. He was a teacher, and he stopped by the college library almost every day. He’d bring home wonders in his scarred and battered briefcase.

Somehow, I came away with the idea that I could get an education from the library. In a way, I did.

• Source: Dylan Thomas’s Choice: An Anthology of Verse Spoken by Dylan Thomas, edited by Ralph Maud and Aneiran Talfin Davies; New York: New Directions, 1963

'Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less'

 We humans want more. We strive for more. To get more — money and possessions, mainly — we work more.

And so we have “time famines” among software engineers. The War College discovered that the Army had ordered its officers to complete 297 days of activities in 256 days. There are always more tasks, never less.

Leidy Klotz, a professor at the University of Virginia, has made a study of this rush for more. His research shows humans “systematically opt for more,” even when subtracting provides a better solution.

Part of this is culture, and part is biology. Kangaroo rats are famous hoarders. They are not abstract thinkers. They acquire and store things, including calories, on instinct. We humans seem to have the same instincts.

I’m interested for at least a couple of reasons.

I worked for corporations. I was puzzled at the constant demands to do additional tasks, even when doing them hurt our productivity and our products. I agree with Klotz’s view that subtraction is a neglected tool.

But also I’m a writer, and good writing is largely about subtraction. If you give people a writing sample and ask them to improve it, most will add length. But people who habitually write are likely to cut it. They subtract words, delete sentences. They edit.

Klotz’s book suggests a lot of things — corporate work routines and economics that drive climate change — could benefit from people who think about less, rather than more, about subtraction, rather than addition.

Personally, I have a new list: Things to Stop Doing.

• Source: Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less; New York: Flatiron Books, 2021.

Is is a bird? A plane?

 A sharp-eyed reader noticed that I called this year-old contraption a collection of notes, that I did not use the word “blog,” and asked if I had a problem.

Yes, I do, but I can’t get my finger on it. There’s something about the diction that seems off. That word doesn’t quite get at what I’m trying to do.

I might use that word one day to describe this venture. But not today.

Marking an anniversary

 This collection of notes began a year ago. By now, I should be able to tell you what this is all about, and I would if I knew. If you’re reading, you’re watching a person think. Not much of an explanation, but it's  the best I can do.

Wittgenstein meets the Circle 2

 You cannot logically derive an ought (a value) from an is (a fact).

That’s not an empirical statement — a hypothesis that an ethicist proposed and then tested experimentally. It’s a statement about the limits of thought, a statement about logic.

The remarkable thing is that though we understand why we can’t derive an ought from an is, we do it every day. Further, we blame people who don’t. Sometimes we put them in prison.

As Paul Woodruff points out, this is the story of Achilles in the Trojan War.

Achilles, furious at a slight, sulked in his tent while the other Greeks were fighting and, without his leadership, dying. When Achilles’s best friend was killed, Achilles came to his senses.

You cannot derive an ought from an is, but everyone did. All the Greeks acknowledged that Achilles was a great warrior. But no one thought he’d done the right thing by pouting in his tent. Even Achilles finally saw the light.

If you don’t see the point of the myth, take a case from everyday reality: Imagine driving down the freeway and seeing a toddler on the side of the road, about to wander into traffic.

Are you having trouble deriving an ought (an action you should do) from the is (the fact of the toddler’s situation)?

Wittgenstein’s point to the Vienna Circle was that vital human activity occurs in areas that logic, mathematics and science simply can’t reach.

That’s the human condition: we face challenges in finding ways to live meaningfully and ethically, and we have to improvise tools of thought as we go because the laws that govern our sciences don’t help us in these cases.

That’s why we need the humanities and people to teach them and people to study them. A failure to grasp that is a spectacular failure.

Wittgenstein meets the Circle

 I would love to have witnessed a famous moment in intellectual history: when the Vienna Circle met Wittgenstein.

The Vienna Circle was made up of mathematicians and scientists. Most were Positivists, meaning they were looking for a coherent way to state the case that science is about what really is, and that other talk — talk of arts, literature, music, aesthetics, ethics, religion, etc. — is nonsense.

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus offered possibilities, they thought, in providing a theory that would divide the sheep from the goats.

When they invited Wittgenstein, the members of the Circle indeed found a person who could articulate why scientific propositions can be expressed in verifiable terms and other matters of human interest cannot.

They were delighted with Wittgenstein’s ability to illuminate the distinction between these two kinds of human activity.

They were appalled as they gradually realized that he thought they were focused on the least important kind.

Presuming to speak for Wittgenstein is hubris, but I think this is fair: Wittgenstein thought that science was an enormously important human activity. But not the most important, and not the most interesting.

I’m telling this story because, in our times, a lot of students — and teachers — are giving up on the humanities.

It’s a story I wish more people knew.

What they did with the sick

 Somehow, lying in bed recovering, I remembered what Montaigne said about how the ancient Babylonians dealt with their sick.

They healthy hauled the sick to market so everyone would get to inspect them and suggest a cure.

It was medicine by helpful suggestion. Or so said Montaigne.

Montaigne’s story made me smile. No one is threatening to put me in a wheelbarrow and haul me to market. I’m grateful I can just lie in bed.

In another essay that mentions his own sickness, Montaigne said:

Many things appear greater in thought than in fact … I used to pity the sick much more than I find myself deserving of pity now that I am sick myself, and that the power of my imagination made the true essence of the actual sickness bigger by half. I hope that the same thing will happen with death and that it will not be worth all the trouble I am taking to prepare for it.

Montaigne’s imagination doesn’t work quite like mine. I imagined that having COVID would be like having a tiger by the tail, and it was for me. And though I worry needlessly about many topics, turning the possibilities over in my imagination, death isn’t one of them. 

• Sources: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993. The note on Babylonian medicine is from “On the resemblance of children to their fathers,” p. 882. He pinched the story from Herodotus, but Montaigne’s version stuck in my mind. The extended quotation that mentions his illness is from “On practice,” p. 418.

COVID: A personal survival guide

 A cautionary tale about letting your mask down:

I tested positive at 4 p.m. Friday and got a prescription for Paxlovid, which I started that evening. I don’t remember much of Saturday, a feverish and dreamy day, something out of a Katherine Anne Porter story. 

I was weak but at least partly lucid Sunday. I saw the brilliant young doctor Monday.

I suggested that having the virus was like diving into the sea on a moonless night — so dark it can be hard to find the surface. She corrected my metaphor: my case was a quick, steep dive and a quick return to the surface, made possible by vaccinations and Paxlovid.

What I learned:

• If in doubt, use your test kit provided by the government. Use it sooner, rather than later. Eliminate the doubt.

• If the test is positive, call the doctor and ask specifically for Paxlovid or a similar drug. Take it immediately. A quick response means a quick return to the surface.

• Keep some throat lozenges in the medicine cabinet. I thought I was up on COVID. But I was surprised by the severity of the sore throat. Even trying to swallow was painful. Symptoms vary, of course. But if your symptoms turn out to be like mine, you’ll be proud of that sack of lozenges, as we say in Texas.

• Keep a carton of orange juice or some other source of vitamin C in the icebox. I knew that people with the virus tend to dehydrate. But, even with that knowledge, I had trouble getting enough fluids down.

A few days before I got sick, I’d had truck trouble and had to call for a tow. The driver, who wasn’t wearing a mask, said he was surprised to see that I was. He said he hadn’t seen anyone wearing a mask in a long time.

Being careful doesn't make you bulletproof. The virus is everywhere. As my doctor says, that’s what “pandemic” means. But it’s not a bad idea — certainly not a silly idea — to cut your risks as much as you can.

'A certain amount of unhinged reality'

 A bit more on Lorraine Hansberry’s point about the values that come through the culture.

Guy Davenport put it this way: “Southerners take a certain amount of unhinged reality for granted.”

Consider just a few of the things that came through the culture when I was a boy:

I’m old enough to remember legal segregation, the separate drinking fountains at the courthouse. You were required to believe what obviously was false: that this country treated people of African descent with justice.

I’m old enough to remember half-literate but fully-frenzied preachers giving detailed accounts of the Judgment Day, with emphasis on the Lake of Fire. You had to believe all that was literally true. But you had to believe, at the same time, that the snake-handling preachers in the river bottoms were religious fanatics.

There were impossibly difficult rules you just had to absorb. A Davenport example: You could talk about movies, but had remember which people you were talking to. Some people thought you were going to hell if you went to the picture show, and that the hellfire might be catching.

I’m talking as if this unhinged reality were in the past. I still witness the most casual acts of racism. And millions of Southerners believe Trump won the election.

Lorraine Hansberry’s point was that when you are thinking about a fictional or dramatic character, you have to keep thinking until you get to values that did not come from the culture.

The stuff that comes through the culture is the stuff you have to endure. It doesn’t get interesting until you get beyond it.

 

Lorraine Hansberry on characters

 What values do you have that did not come from your culture?

That question comes from Lorraine Hansberry. She used to ask it about characters in her plays. It’s telling in drama, telling also in ethics.

One of the recurring themes in this collection of notes is how human beings come to religious beliefs. That’s one of those things that comes from the culture.

It’s interesting that Hansberry thought that a writer, in developing a character, had to get to at least one value that came from somewhere else.

Her question is a master class for writers.

A new biography of Charles Lamb

 Here’s a cause for celebration: Clare Bucknell reports in the New York Review of Books that a new biography of Charles Lamb, the English essayist, has been published.

It’s Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb by Eric G. Wilson, a professor at Wake Forest who appears to be interested in Lamb's peculiar cast of mind.

I’m excited about the new biography because I have the current standard, written by E.V. Lucas. It was published 117 years ago.

Public enthusiasm for Lamb has never threatened to unhinge the republic.

But I love him dearly. I’m resigned to being in the minority in estimating his value.

I think “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig” is the great English essay. When I was younger, I read everything I could by Lamb: Essays of Elia, of course, but also the letters — those magnificent letters.

If you’re curious about why such a minor writer could inspire such devotion, there is a single sentence in Professor Bucknell’s review that gets to the matter. She quotes a passage of Lamb’s writing and says:

This is Lamb cogitating.

That’s it exactly. Lamb thinks aloud, just as Montaigne thought aloud. (But interesting thinkers are interesting because they don’t think like others. Montaigne’s thinking is nothing like Lamb’s.)

Lamb’s and Montaigne’s essays are examples of the kind of writing I like best: one person with an interesting mind trying to think something out.

A pleasure that's a kind of wealth

 I’ve been following a reader’s progress through James Joyce’s Ulysses. The reader is Michael Leddy, a retired English professor. It’s been fun to see his notes on this 100-year-old novel.

I think of that pleasure as a kind of wealth. Maybe that sense of wealth is part of what came into me through the culture. It’s a way of thinking that’s so close to me that I’m hardly aware of it.

But I feel rich when I feel the pleasure of a good book — or get to listen in on the discussion of a challenging book by a discerning reader.

The poet William Stafford did a better job of expressing this idea. So I’ll let him take over.

Stafford spoke of the wealth and poverty he experienced as a boy in Kansas. Here’s the poverty:

That Christmas Mother made paper

presents; we colored them with crayons

and hung up a tumbleweed for a tree.

Here’s the wealth:

the library had books we hadn’t read.

It’s not just me. For some of us, this kind of thing is more fun than Christmas, more joyous than payday.

Sources: You can see what I’m talking about on the pleasure of seeing a good reader read a good book at Michael Leddy’s blog, Orange Crate Art, at https://mleddy.blogspot.com. The quotations are from the poem “The Rescued Year” in William Stafford, The Way It Is; Minneapolis, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1998, pp. 107-109.

A poet talks of time

 Stephen Dunn’s book Different Hours is about time. It’s also about how different human beings can experience it differently.

Take Odysseus, for example, whose trip home after the war took time. Odysseus sometimes thought his life was with his family back home. But he dallied quite a bit, living an interesting life along the way.

Dunn says Odysseus’s secret is that “this other life had become his life.” He always thought of home.

            But after a few years, like anyone on his own,

            he couldn’t separate what he’d chosen

            from what had chosen him. …

            A man finds his shipwrecks.

            Tells himself the necessary stories.

The poem has a dimension that strikes me as religious, or almost religious.

The poet asks: What are the gods? Our own fears? Intimations from the unseen order of things?

Whatever they are, they finally released Odysseus, and he zipped home.

Source: These lines are from “Odysseus’s Secret” in Stephen Dunn, Different Hours; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002, p. 32-33.

A place eventually tells you something

 One more note on sense of place: It develops with your capacity to notice things.

There’s a long island in Elmendorf Lake, the wide spot along Zarzamora Creek.

The authorities built a weir dam on the creek in the 1970s, one of the many measures to control flooding.

The island was created as the water backed up, flooding the existing creek channel and also a swampy area.

But which of the channels — north or south — was the main channel? Which was the swamp?

On the island, there are 14 old cypress trees, all facing the north channel. Cypress trees stand on the banks of every stream in Central Texas. These 14 testify that the north channel was the original, and they grew up on its banks. 

These witnesses give testimony to all who have eyes to see. But you have to get out and see the place first, and then you have to think about what your see.

Developing a sense of place

 Yesterday’s long note was yet another attempt at trying to describe a sense of place.

I found the Swanflower vines on the south bank of Zarzamora Creek, about 50 yards below the forks, its confluence with Apache Creek.

I found the vines because I was looking for them. I’d seen an enormous butterfly with the bluest wings I’d ever seen.

I searched my field guides. Perhaps the ancient Greeks would have told a myth.

One of the recurring themes of these notes is how we develop a sense of place, a sense of connection with our environment. My last stab at it was “A sense of place,” July 19, 2022.

Toxic to most, but not to one butterfly

 Swanflower is a small herb that plays an interesting role in the environment along Zarzamora Creek: it’s interesting because it’s toxic. Ironically, it was given to women in childbirth.

The plants in the genus Aristolochia are known as pipevines, so named because the flowers looked like deeply curved tobacco pipes to European settlers.

The species that’s common along San Antonio’s creeks is A. erecta, or Swanflower. A. reticulate, common on the Red River, is known as Texas Ducthman’s pipe. (The deeply curved pipes, such as Meerschaums, may have been associated with German immigrants, or “Dutchmen.” While Aristolochia flowers looked like tobacco pipes to European settlers, they look like orchids to botanists.)

Atistolochia is the prototypical genus of Aristolochiacea, the birthwort family. “Wort” is the old word for herb, so the common name reflects the Greek words aristos and locheia for “excellent” and “childbirth.” Pipevines are still used by midwives in various cultures, although the toxins in these plants have generally put them out of favor in the West.

Many plants in this family have aristolochic acid, which can induce genetic mutations. The evidence mounted that the acid can lead to kidney damage and cancer, prompting warnings from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The toxins are a key to the pipevines’ ecology, and the plants are associated with a butterfly.

Pipevine swallowtails, Battus philenor, are big black swallowtails with hindwings of iridescent blue. While other animals, including humans, get sick from the pipevines’ toxins, Pipevine swallowtails and their relatives thrive on Aristolochia.

The adult female lays her eggs on the pipevine, and then the hatching caterpillars go to work. They are voracious. They tend to eat the entire plant, then go in search of the next.

Birds are the main predators of butterfly caterpillars. But the Pipevine swallowtail caterpillars have absorbed so much toxin that birds that eat them get sick. The result: birds eat other caterpillars, but avoid Pipevine swallowtails.

Biologists say that’s an example of adaptation. The Pipevine swallowtails evolved by developing an immunity to the toxins that make them unpalatable to predators.

Some biologists have suggested that Aristolochia erecta is itself evolving to mimic trailing grass. The advantage is that plants that don’t look like a typical pipevine to a Pipevine swallowtail caterpillar wouldn’t get devoured.

The plant is associated with the whole lifecycle of Battus philenor. The adult males stake out the pipevines and wait for the females. A male then hovers above the female, fanning her with pheromones.

The female lays her red-orange on the pipevine’s stems, usually in a place that is open to sunlight. If the eggs were tiny pool balls, they’d be stripes. Aristolochia butterflies excrete a stripe of material on each egg. It’s nourishing — and the first thing the caterpillar eats when it emerges from the egg. The caterpillar then eats the remainder of the egg and then goes to work on the plant.

Most Pipevine swallowtail caterpillars are brown-black. But in areas with higher temperatures, including Texas, most caterpillars are red. (Generally, Pipevine swallowtails produce two generations a year, one of which overwinters as pupae.)

The caterpillars are about 2 inches long and have orange spots in rows along their bodies.

Caterpillars go through phases and then pupate. The pupae are green or brown, with a distinctive wing-shaped widening along the sides. These “wings” usually are streaked with purple.

The butterfly that emerges is striking. Swallowtails are large butterflies — their wingspan can reach 5 inches. The iridescent blue on the hindwings is hard to miss.

Consulting the creek again

 I take Harvey’s famous saying “All we know is still infinitely less than what remains unknown” as the first law of the cosmos.

Instead of learning about the entire cosmos, I set myself to learn about a piece of public land along Zarzamora Creek about a mile from our house.

Earlier in life, I began to keep a journal. It was based on the notion — a whim, a sliver of imagination — that if I paid attention, the cosmos would give me (or share with me) a little gift. Note the big if. If I paid attention, if I noticed, I would see that something remarkable, perhaps something wonderful, had indeed crossed my path that day. So, like William Carlos Williams, I had a standing heading in my notebook: “Things I noticed today that I had not previously noticed.” It was about paying attention.

Learning takes time. But, after looking at the creek for five years, Harvey’s rule still applies. What I know about it is infinitely less than what I would like to know.

Consulting the creek

 When the Taoist sages would go on a retreat, they would say they were going to consult the mountain. Just so. I go consult the creek.

I was walking down the south bank where there are several kinds of reeds, which are distinct from the sedges by feel. “Sedges have edges, while reeds are round.” You can, by running your hand over the culm, or long main stalk of the plant, tell whether it’s triangular, and thus a sedge, or round, and thus a reed.

I was trying to see the difference, rather than feel it, to find the small details that would allow me to tell, from across the creek, what I was looking at.

It’s possible, while going on a walk, to think about profound questions. When I do that, the reeds and sedges disappear. I don’t see the swallows feeding over the lake or hear the cardinals singing.

Conversely, if I am walking around the creek looking at rushes and sedges, I’m incapable of thinking about profound questions. My mind doesn’t go blank. It becomes still in this way: for that moment, it doesn’t concern itself with questions about philosophy, the pandemic, the American political tragedy. Only sedges and reeds.

Where did ceremonies come from?

 Yesterday’s note was on Edward B. Tylor’s suggestion about the origins of religion.

Having just read Paul Woodruff’s Reverence, I think this might be a helpful way to look at the topic.

1. Ceremonies or practices are older than the religions we have today.

2. Some ceremonies or practices are attempts to train the emotions, to help a person feel the feelings he or she ought to feel, as Woodruff would say. Another way to put it is that ceremonies are designed to make us more virtuous. It’s possible, for example, to imagine ceremonies to make us feel more courageous, more compassionate, more just.

3. Ceremonies are performed. Performances can be perfunctory — just going through the motions. But they also can involve real feelings, real emotion. Like any other capacity — the capacity to lift weights in a gym or the capacity to run long distances — we can train ourselves to feel the right feelings in the right situations. We can improve a natural capacity.

4. It’s possible, in other words, to imagine a better person, a human being living a better life.

The origin of relgion

 When I was a student, introductory courses on the philosophy of religion began with arguments about the existence of God. I always wanted to begin elsewhere, with the question of what religion is — where the religious impulse comes from, and why it’s a feature of most but not all cultures.

Do you know where religion comes from?

Edward B. Tylor, a pioneering cultural anthropologist, thought that religion probably began when primitive humans saw the dead in their dreams. They cooked up explanations of spirits and souls to explain how the dead could be alive in some sense.

Early humans offered a supernatural explanation of a natural phenomenon — dreaming — that they didn’t understand.

I’m not ready to endorse Tylor’s suggestion. But I’m impressed by the attempt to answer a question that a lot of thinkers have dodged — or so it seems to me. The idea was in Tylor’s Primitive Culture, published in 1871. It’s been around for more than 150 years.

The sovereign doctor of our grief

 I never know what to say about grief. I can tell you what Montaigne said about grief. He said two things that might be helpful.

First, Montaigne said grief is like a runaway horse. The best thing you can do is let it run. It’ll will tire and run out of steam. The worst thing you can do is to try to rein it in. It just makes the runaway beast more explosive.

Second, Montaigne says you can’t fight grief by consoling people. But you can sometimes distract them.

When he was touched by grief, Montaigne made himself fall in love, which took him away from his loss.

The same applies everywhere: some painful idea gets hold of me: I find it quicker to change it than subdue it. …

That is Nature’s way when it grants us inconstancy; for Time, which she gives us as the sovereign doctor of our griefs, above all achieves its ends by furnishing our powers of thought with ever more different concerns.

• Source: The quotation comes from “On Diversion” in Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 941.

How you show her something wonderful

 I’ve mentioned the poet Alice Oswald a couple of times as one of the remarkable talents of our time. Another is Kathleen Jamie of Scotland.

I love her poem “The Stags.” It begins:

This is the multitude, the beasts 

you wanted to show me, drawing me 

upstream, all morning up through wind-

scoured heather to the hillcrest.

The poet looks at the herd, somber 

like the signatories of a covenant; 

 and heavily antlered,

like masts in a harbor, or city spires. 

It’s a breathtaking sight, and she wonders why her companion dragged her that long way to see it.

I suspect you’d 

hoped to impress me, to lift to my sight 

our shared country, lead me deeper 

into what you know, but loath

to cause fear you’re already moving 

quietly away, sure I’ll go with you, 

as I would now, almost anywhere.

In an earlier life, I held on to a job longer than I should have to be near a wilderness in East Texas. I spent every free day in the woods.

One day, when I found a remarkable woman, I asked her if I could show her those deep, beautiful woods. It still astonishes me, decades later, that she said yes.

• Source: The full poem is here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55800/the-stags

A short sentence from Linnaeus

 Linnaeus said: “There is no such thing as a new species.” 

Our conception of biology is barely imaginable without Linnaeus. Nevertheless that sentence is in my notebook. I turn to it as a reminder that even a genius can be confident about beliefs that are simply wrong. Or confident about concepts that turn out to be muddles.

How would you define good judgment?

 Here’s Montaigne, talking about good judgment:

Whoever thought he lacked sense? … In others we readily acknowledge superior courage, physical strength, experience, agility and beauty; but superior judgment we concede to none.

We all know good judgment when we see it. But if you try to define it, it’s tricky. As Montaigne points out, good judgment is usually something we have and they don’t.

I can’t give you a definition of good judgment, but I’m persuaded it involves the way we go about making decisions when all the facts aren’t in.

If we knew all the facts, the smart move would be obvious. But life is seldom like that. Being in a position where you have to make decisions without knowing all that you need to know … well, to me, that just about covers the human condition.

• Sources: The quotation comes from “On Presumption” in Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 745. Although I put down Paul Woodruff’s Reverence (Oxford University Press, 2001) a week ago, things he wrote keep coming to mind. He said reverence is not the only way to avoid making terrible mistakes. A perfect knowledge of the facts or divine guidance would make me immune from error. (And “error free” would be pretty cool, in terms of good judgment.) But such clarity seems to be beyond me.

Why don't babies have teeth?

 Zora Neale Hurston was a preacher’s daughter who had a questioning mind. She thought about babies' teeth, for example. Everyone knows babies have to have teeth. Why don’t babies come already equipped?

Such simple questions, raised in childhood, led to a more difficult one: “if Christ, God’s son, hated to die, and God hated for Him to die, and having everybody grieving over it ever since, why did He have to do it? Why did people die anyway?”

The same story moves countless people to embrace faith and leaves others baffled.

The quotation is from Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road. I came across it in Christopher Cameron’ Black Freethinkers,which is filling one of the many holes in my education.

Some of the most interesting people in this part of Texas were German freethinkers who settled in places like Comfort and Sisterdale in the 19^th century. It’s hard to imagine Texas towns without churches, but for decades, there were such places.

I’ve known about the European freethinkers since I was a teenager living in New Braunfels. Black freethinkers? 

So much has been written about the influence of Black churches that I’d lost track of all those who, like Hurston, simply chose another way.

• Christopher Cameron, Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism; Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2109.

Louise Glück's 'Parable of the Swans'

 Yesterday’s note on Louise Glück made me do some searching.

Her Nobel Lecture mentions a contest, conducted when she was 5 or 6, to declare the greatest poem in the world. It made me think — against her warnings — about which poem of hers I’d claim to like best.

I think it’s “Parable of the Swans.”

The male believes love is a feeling in the heart. The female believes love is what you do. After 10 years, they hit a patch of slimy water.

                        Sooner or later in a long

            life together, every couple encounters

            some emergency like this, some

            drama which results

            in harm. This

            occurs for a reason: to test

            love and to demand

            fresh articulation of its complex terms.

If you are lucky enough to have had a long life together with someone, I’d guess you’d like this poem.

• Source: The poem is here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49615/parable-of-the-swans

 

The intimate voice of poetry

 I’m always on the prowl for one-night reads — interesting alternatives to an evening of TV sitcoms and lost hours on the Internet.

Here’s a suggestion: Louise Glück’s 2020 Nobel Lecture. It’s short.

Glück argues that poetry is the intimate voice of private life, and that we’re in danger of losing it as our lives become increasingly public. It contains this sentence:

I am talking about a temperament that distrusts public life or sees it as the realm in which generalization obliterates precision, and partial truth replaces candor and charged disclosure.

I spent my working life as a newspaperman, working to make things public, to resolve differences in public and to examine public life. But I understand that deep distrust of public life. And that experience examining public life might be one reason that I love poetry so.

• Sources: The lecture is here:

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2020/gluck/lecture/

For more on one-night reads, see the series of notes and recommendations from Oct. 28 through Nov. 2, 2021.

A Texas writer you should know

 Christopher Cook is probably best known for Robbers, a mystery that has so many surprises you can’t talk about the novel without spoiling some of the fun.

If you are trying to write a novel, I’d read this one and take notes.

People who are not from Texas usually think of the Hollywood version, heavy on the landscapes and cattle of West Texas. They are surprised to find that East Texas is covered in pine forests and sawmill hands.

My friend Christopher has that part of the world down: the talk, the characters, the way the cops think and the way the food smells.

Some of his short stories are in Screen Door Jesus & Other Stories. He's as good as it gets on the peculiar role religious belief plays in this part of the world. His short story "Heresies," for example, is about two guys hired as security guards for a conference of theologians who are supposed to give the Austin City Council some advice on a gay rights ordinance. One of the guards is an old hippie, and the other listens to too much talk radio.

Christopher can tell a story. Today’s his birthday, and I’m wishing him well.

• Sources: Robbers was published by No Exit Press in 2001 and then by Berkley Trade in 2002. Screen Door Jesus & Other Stories was published by Host Publications in 2006. Cloven Tongues of Fire was published as a Kindle edition in 2011. 

Alice Oswald's long poem Dart

 Five or six years ago, The Telegraph asked its readers “Is Alice Oswald Our Greatest Living Poet?”

That was before she was named professor of poetry at Oxford, but I was already a fan. I’d read Dart and thought it was one of the best long poems of our time.

The Dart is a river in Devon. Oswald spent two years recording the voices of people along the river, from its source at Cranmere Pool on Dartmoor to the sea.

If you read it, you’ll hear the voices of a doomed naval cadet, a naturalist, a boat builder, a crabber and many others. You’ll hear the voice of a greedy salmon poacher, explaining the temptation of a lad to set an illegal net:

            In twenty minutes he’s covered the cost of the net,

            in an hour he’s got a celebration coming.

And throughout the poem, you’ll hear the voice of the river and of those who love it:

            why is it so sedulously clattering

            so like a man mechanically muttering

            so sighing, so endlessly seeking

            to hinge his fantasies to his speaking. 

Raindrops from a big watershed flow sometimes gently, sometimes dangerously, into the dreamlike sea.

When I’m down and blue, the artistry of this poem restores me. It’s a work of genius, I think.

• Alice Oswald, Dart; London: Faber & Faber, 2002. If all this sounds familiar, I mentioned Alice Oswald’s long poem Memorial on Memorial Day. And Dart was included in a list of one-night reads on Oct. 31, 2021.

A very short conversation

 My father, who was also named Heber, was born on this day in 1924. Today would have been his 98^th birthday.

He died on Feb. 28. I mentioned his death in “A conversation from long ago” on March 3, 2021.

He was laconic.

When I was young, I asked him: “What is the secret of good writing?”

He replied: “Short words, short sentences.”

That’s what he said. If he’d been writing, he would have done something about the comma splice.